The second book I’ve completed for my research is Digital Games and Language Learning by Freitas and Maharg. 2011 isn’t too long ago generally speaking, but 5 years is on the older side for video games. A couple of the educational games it referenced were even older – dating back to the early 2000s.

This book spent a lot of time talking about “Serious Games” with the Capitals And Everything. I had never heard of Serious Games, and the authors did not define it anywhere in their book at all. I later found out that is just refers to games whose primary purpose is something other than entertainment, but no one besides educators uses this term as far as I’m aware.  They also talked a lot about Feedback, sometimes with and sometimes without capitals, which they also failed to define. I initially thought the chapter about feedback would be on student response to a game, IE game testing, but instead it seems that by “feedback” the authors are referring instead to the brain’s response to input.

The first several chapters were spent on not-quite-relevant pedagogy theory and more ambiguous uses of terminology. Later on, however, they made several useful cases for what should be part of an educational game:

• Students should have the freedom to fail, experiment, and exert effort
• games are not about memorization
• build scaffolding for future learning: ideally, people who have played my games would be better off in their next language course than another student in the same course who hadn’t had the extra practice
• offer clear incentives for more success
• partial rewards for partial success
• avoid brick walls – ie not letting players into a certain area until they’re at a high enough level (there are ways around this that don’t frustrate players)

The rest of it talked about stealth learning – that is definitely something I hope to accomplish, particularly with cultural and literary learning.